No guy she'd been with ever understood that kidding around was her way of showing affection.

She grew up with three brothers. You didn't hold doll tea parties, you wrestled, climbed trees and ran around playing medieval knights, or Jedis with baseball bats and golf clubs until dad yelled at you. You pranked and embarrassed each other. You made fun of each others' flaws and insecurities. This had been so ingrained in the course of her upbringing that she was virtually immune to ridicule, and when it came from a guy she liked, these days it even kind of excited her.

Older, she heard the sexual details of her brothers' love lives as they boasted to each other, and was habituated to frank sexual discussion.

It didn't occur to her that girls weren't supposed to act like this, at least, not until she went to a female boarding school and found herself irritated and bemused by the coy titters and giggles of the other girls, and their evasive language. They also didn't get her colorful and sometimes abrasive sense of humor.

Still, she tried to model after them, at least physically. They were experts on hair, makeup and fashion, poise, posture, voice, language -- the micro management of every female sexual indicator tailored to attract male attention. And she needed to catch up. She learned quickly. She needn't have tried hard, though; for her, puberty delivered in spades, giving her an enormously unfair share of male attention. That only made the other girls more distant from her.

She was in a couple of relationships with guys, which didn't amount to much because they didn't get her. They were too protective, or too adoring of her, or too critical if she made an unexpected jibe at their expense. She was like a free roaming puppy and they wanted to harness her and train her. They never became angry with her, or made fun of her, and she needed that. Just like a puppy needed rough play, she needed charged verbal intercourse.

And then she went into a brief period of despondent singledom, wondering if her standards were too high and that's just how relationships were.

Finally, one night, at a big party at a friend’s house, she wandered off to look for the friend’s cat, not really knowing anyone and feeling alienated by the other womens’ idle conversation. After losing a game of pool, she also lost her balance on a towering pair of slingback heels and nearly fell into a pool beyond the patio. To be fair, she was courting certain disaster after so many cocktails. And not the girly kind.

A man sputtered with laughter from one of the deck chairs facing the pool. Surprised laughter, but not cruel though he was not just laughing, but openly, carelessly. He wasn't even drunk by the sounds of it. She automatically twinged with embarrassment for a fraction of a second before realizing she was too drunk to care, to be honest she was just grateful she hadn't smashed her face on the pool perimeter. No damage done, not even a scrape. The pool was bordered by wood panelling, thankfully, rather than less forgiving concrete.

"Jerry, you cow!" a woman piped up with irritation and came over to help Jennifer up. "Gosh, are you alright?"

Jennifer gently brushed the woman away. "I'm fine."

"You missed the diving board..." the man said baldly, "...and the pool. Have another try."

Jennifer found herself smiling in spite of herself as she began removing her heels.

"Yeah, take the culprits off," the woman nodded, "yeesh, girl, are you trying to outdo Godzilla? You could flatten a skyline with those things. Then, misinterpreting Jennifer's smile for embarrassment, she said: "Don't worry about him. He has problems. He's come out here to sulk and be all alone."

Then, reassured that Jennifer was okay, the woman wandered off, but not before shooting the man one last dirty look over her shoulder.

It was difficult to make out the man's features in the dark but he looked kind of nice, not nasty and crabby at all, like she'd expected. He didn't look very tall, either, which emboldened her to walk, barefooted, over to him and sit herself on the nearest deck chair. There was a stand propped with a tray and an almost full drink on it. She took it and had a taste, not caring what it was, just hoping it was his and that he would tell her off for appropriating it, but he didn't.

She ribbed him about being on his own, he smiled and took it without argument. His ears were slightly big, she noticed, not distractingly so, actually kind of endearing, but she made fun and he took that gracefully, too.

Then he asked about her. She faltered. Her voice went deep inside herself and wandered around in circles, but she found herself opening up, losing her low defensive voice, her tone enrichening with humor and exposing her unique brand of ribald flirtiness that made men so uncomfortable but did not dent his confidence at all.

Instead, it was her insides that were weak and fluttery, in a way that made her feel silly and girlish -- the kind of thing she'd distanced herself from for so long. She kept reminding herself, though she was drunk, he was not; his was genuine warmth and confidence that was not going to vanish by tomorrow morning. And she did want to see him tomorrow morning. He wasn't darkly handsome in the smoldering sense but boyishly cute. There was plenty of male eye candy back inside, but he was also easy to talk to, fun, unjudgmental, and didn't balk at her jokes. She didn't understand why he was out here on his own, content to drink and silently watch people swim. Then again, she realized, she was hardly mingling with much success herself.

Some people were playing around in the pool and threatening to splash them now. What time was it? she wondered. She felt like she'd been in a trance. The man gingerly got to his feet.

"Nice talking to you," he smiled at her with a flash of genuine warmth, and began to wander back to the house. She jumped up, grabbed her heels, and followed him back inside, hit with a sudden paranoid fear that this guy was a unicorn and if she let him waver back into the crowd, she would never see him again and no one would know who he was. She racked her brains frantically; had she even given her name? And what did he say his name was again?

"Hey you!" a loud male voice said. "Where have you been hiding?" And suddenly the man was pulled away from her by an incredibly tall, broad-shouldered guy, who wrapped his muscled arm around his neck and raked his knuckles along his scalp. Then he yanked the smaller man’s shirt cleanly over his head, scrunched it up and tossed it across the room, and then shoved him into the generous-sized, beer-bloated stomach of his equally large, broad friend.

"Yeah, bare me some titty, doll," the man grinned widely, and before the smaller man could react, reached in and tweaked his nipples between his huge, blunt ended fingers, absurdly preventing Jerry's escape. Then the man took him up under the armpits and lifted him onto his thigh, supporting him with one Herculean arm around his back, another giant hand parting his legs to cup his groin. He bounced the smaller man on his leg, miming a sex act, and lampooning the display with exaggerated moans and facial expressions of anguished bliss.

"Wow, three seconds," the smaller man said blankly, being put back down on terra firma. "That's a new record for you."

The guys roared with laughter. As the smaller man bowed to snatch up his t shirt off the ground, one of the guys shoved his head, causing him to stagger.

At some point Jennifer had lost her voice, and felt bad at herself for standing there goggling, like the rest of the crowd. But she felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights. She never imagined the warm, confident guy she'd just been talking and laughing with in a scene like this. Earlier, she had targeted him where she thought it would hurt, and he had just brushed her off cheerfully.

The man just sauntered out of the building without looking back, somehow maintaining his dignity, though his shirt was still off and his nipples were red.

Suddenly Jennifer found her voice again, and cursed herself for not getting his number when she had the chance. Avoiding the gorillas now high fiving each other, she identified a familiar female face in the crowd and went over. The friend was still giggling, Jennifer noticed with a twinge of irritation.

"What was that about?" she said casually.

"Oh, just playing," said the friend, shaking her head. "They always do that. Jerry's used to it."

Jerry, she repeated to herself, willing herself to remember.

"Was that the smaller guy?" He wasn't even that small, just those guys had been so unfairly huge.

"Yeah. Why?"

"He left something of his by the pool," Jennifer lied. "I better return it. You know his number?"

The woman nodded and scrolled through her phone's contacts, and then gave Jennifer his number. Turns out his last name was 'Mousseau,' pronounced 'Moo-so' – French, though he didn't have the accent.

The next day she called the number. Turns out the number was inactive. The woman hadn’t updated her contact list in a while.